“What about my children? I could never leave them.”
“I know, I know. That’s one of your attractions.”
“You’re shamefully perverse, Benya. What am I doing with you?”
“You’re a wonderful mother. I’ve behaved badly all my life—but not you. You’re a real woman of milk and blood, a Party matron, an editor, a mother. Tell me, how’s the magazine?”
“Wildly busy. The Women’s Committee is planning a gala for Comrade Stalin’s sixtieth in December; we’re doing a special issue for the Revolution Holidays; I’ve managed to get Snowy into her first Pioneers’ Camp at Artek—she’s already dreaming of wearing her famous red scarf. But best of all, Gideon is back home.”
“But he could still be doomed, you know. They could just be playing him like a fish on a hook.”
“No, Vanya says he might be all right. Comrade Stalin said at the Congress—”
“No more Party claptrap, Sashenka,” Benya said urgently. “We haven’t time to talk about congresses. There’s only now! Only us.”
They turned a corner, away from the ponds, and suddenly they were on their own. Sashenka took his hand. “Do you look forward to seeing me?”
“All day. Every minute.”
“Then why are you looking so mischievous and crafty? Why have you lured me here?”
They were approaching an archway that led into a courtyard. Checking to see that no one was watching them, Golden pulled her into the archway, through the courtyard and into a garden where there was a rickety garden shed, the sort favored by pensioners to store their geranium seeds. He flashed a key. “This is our new dacha.”
“A shed?”
He laughed at her.
“You’re displaying bourgeois morality.”
“I am a Communist, Benya, but when it comes to lovemaking I couldn’t be more aristocratic if I tried!”
“Imagine it’s the secret pavilion of Prince Yusupov or Count Sheremetev!” He unlocked the wooden door. “See! Imagine!”
“How can you even think for a moment that I would…” Sashenka realized that the days of living with Vanya in the spartan bunk beds of their tiny room in the Sixth House of the Soviets were long ago. She was a Bolshevik—but she’d earned her luxuries. “It’s rotten and it stinks of manure.”
“No, that is Madame Chanel’s new perfume.”
“That looks like a garden fork to me!”
“No, Baroness Sashenka, that’s a diamond-encrusted fork made for the Empress herself by the celebrated craftsmen of Dresden.”
“And what’s that disgusting old rag?”
“That blanket? That is a pelt of silk and chinchilla fur for the baroness’s comfort.”
“I’m not going in there,” said Sashenka firmly.
Golden’s face fell but he persisted. “What if I just told you, with no bullshit at all, that this door leads us into a secret world where no one can see us or touch us and where I will love you more than life itself? It’s not a mansion, I know. It may be just a pathetic garden shed, but it is also the shed where I want to adore you and cherish you without wasting another second during my short lifetime in this menacing world. It may sound silly but you’ve arrived in the summer of my life. I’m not old, but I’m no longer young, and I know myself. You are the only woman of my life, the woman I will remember as I die.” He looked very serious suddenly, as he handed her a book he’d drawn out of his jacket—a volume of Pushkin. “I prepared this so we would never forget this moment.”
She opened it and on the page of her favorite poem, “The Talisman,” was a single, rare dried orchid.
He began to recite:
“You never stop surprising me,” she whispered. Sashenka felt so moved and desperate to kiss him that her hands shook. She stepped into the shed and kicked the door shut. Everything in there—tools and seeds and some old boots—seemed as alive and full of love as she was.
Benya took her in his arms, and somehow she could tell by the look in his eyes, and the cast of his lips, that he meant what he’d said, that he did love her, and that this moment, in their private world, was one of those sacred occasions that occur once or twice in a lifetime, and sometimes never at all. She wanted to bottle it, store it, keep it forever in a locket at the very front of her memory so she could always reach for it and live it all over again, but she was so entranced that she couldn’t even hold that thought. She just reached for him and kissed him again and again until they had to go home. But even as they parted, she repeated to herself, You must not lose it, its power is infallible, love gave it to you. And she could scarcely believe her own joy and luck that someone had actually said those words to her.
21
“What now? I’ll complain to the Housing Committee. Stop that rumpus! It’s three a.m.!” shouted Mendel Barmakid, Central Committee member, Orgburo member, Deputy Chairman of the Central Control Commission, Supreme Soviet deputy. His daughter Lena was also awakened by the banging on the door and for a moment she lay there, smiling at her father’s absurdly operatic fury, imagining him in his ancient corded dressing gown, moth-eaten and stained. She heard him open the door of the family apartment in the Government House on the Embankment.
“What is it, Mendel?” called out Mendel’s wife, Natasha.
Now my mother’s up too, thought Lena, and she could almost see the plump Yakut woman with the Eskimo features in her sweeping blue caftan. Her parents were talking to someone. Who could it be?
Lena jumped out of bed, put on a scarlet kimono and her glasses, and came round the corner from her room toward the front door.
She saw her father rubbing his red-rimmed eyes and squinting up at a bulging giant in NKVD uniform. In shining boots, immaculate in his blue and scarlet uniform, holding a riding crop in a hand covered in gaudy rings and a jewel-handled Mauser in the other, Bogdan Kobylov stared down at the three Barmakids. He was not alone.
“Who is it? What do they want, Papa?”
Before Mendel could answer, Kobylov swaggered into the hall, almost blinding Lena with his eye-watering Turkish cologne. “Evening, Mendel. On the orders of the Central Committee, you’re coming with us,” he said in a barely intelligible rustic Georgian accent. “We’ve got to search the apartment and seal your study.”
“You’re not taking him,” said Lena, blocking the way.
“All right! Step back,” said Kobylov in a surprisingly soft voice. “If you waste my time and fuck around, I’ll grind you all to dust, the little mare included. If we keep things polite, it’ll be better for you. As you can imagine, there are other things I’d far rather be doing at this time of night.” He flexed his muscles.
Lena glared up at their tormentor’s jewels and kinky hair but her father laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and pulled her out of Kobylov’s way.
“Thank you, Vladlena,” sneered the interloper with a flashy smile. Lena’s full, revolutionary name, Vlad-Lena, was short for Vladimir Lenin.
“Good evening, comrades,” said Mendel in that Polish-Yiddish Lublin accent that he had never lost. “As a Bolshevik since 1900, I obey any summons from the Central Committee.”
“Good!” Kobylov beamed mockingly.